Note: This idea is on my list of solutions to The World’s Biggest Problems.
Problem: We have selectively bred or genetically modified most nutrients out of most foods.
- This industrialization of food is a leading contributor to many modern health problems.
Solution: Reintroduce the best traits of ancient fruits and vegetables into modern crops.
- Rewind hundreds of years of food industrialization in a decade or less.
Master Plan:
- Reengineer one ancient fruit.
- Mass produce it and sell it to the world.
- Use that money to industrialize the engineering of 100s of new crops.
- While doing above, also keep all patents and research open to the public.
Model: Big Purple Tomato
- The Purple Tomato is a tomato enriched with blueberry anthocyanins.
- AKA a super-superfood.
- Early mice studies show a ~30% increase in lifespan when they get purple tomato powder!
- Purple tomatoes contain 10 times the anthocyanins (antioxidants) vs. regular tomatoes.
The purple tomato was invented by Professor Cathie Martin FRS.
- A small private company, Norfolk Plant Sciences, is finally set to commercialize the first purple tomato seeds and fruits in the United States.
- This is the result of decades of hard work!
- Professor Martin published her research on enriching tomatoes in 2008!
- This is the result of decades of hard work!
Don’t be afraid of purple tomatoes!
- Humans have been hacking food and animals since the beginning of agriculture 12,000+ years ago.
- We’ve actually gone too far and bred too many nutrients out of food.
- We need to go back! Science can reintroduce key ingredients into food.
- We’ve actually gone too far and bred too many nutrients out of food.
We need to promote many of these food enriching projects to bring them to market.
- Open access to Purple Tomatoes, Golden Rice, and other enriched foods would save millions of lives and improve the quality of life for nearly everyone on Earth.
Recreating Ancient Foods is one of my solutions to The World’s Biggest Problems.
- This idea is a work-in-progress. If you’d like to riff on it, hit me up @neilthanedar on Twitter.